Los Angeles
Homicide Detective Art Becker studied the trail of ants streaming into
the open mouth of the dead man. After a minute he hefted his portly frame
upright and waved to his new partner, Rico Chacón.

Chacón's
athletic younger body moved effortlessly toward him. "We've got one more
in the house," Chacón said, staring down at the first victim. Even on
this overcast morning, he wore sunglasses -- Carreras, the kind that adjusted
to the light.

The two
detectives belonged to a team of robbery/homicide investigators that worked
out of the Pacific Division station on Culver and Centinela. Homicide
was not unheard of in these parts. The projects up on Slauson were usually
good for at least a stabbing on a Saturday night. There was a block on
Short Avenue where every other graffiti-covered house was for sale, the
signs riddled with bullet holes. But this street was more your working-class
residential -- a lot of Hispanics, a few blacks, but mainly Midwest transplants.

The two
victims had been tentatively identified by the first unit on the scene
as Dwayne and Lila Mae Summers. Approximate ages: mid-fifties. Becker
made a note of the date, Thursday, January 17, 1985, on a fresh page of
his notebook and next to that he wrote, Cloudy, 50°. In cross-examination,
a criminal-defense attorney had once asked him what the weather had been
like the day of the crime. It had looked bad to the jury when he had to
admit he didn't remember. That was the last time he was going to get caught
like that, he thought, as he continued his inspection of the corpse.

Cause of
death for the guy was probably going to be related to the hole in his
head. It looked like a bullet wound, but Becker knew better than to assume.
He had seen enough tools, kitchen and garden implements, and scraps of
hardware stuck in bodies to know how deceptive entry wounds could be.
Skin stretched and hair made scalp wounds even more difficult to reckon.
Size and shape of the projectile would be determined later by the coroner.
However, judging from the scuff marks in the dirt, it was safe to say
the vic had died on the run. Becker looked for scorch marks from muzzle
flash but found none.

The two
uniformed officers who had first responded to the call and now had the
duty of guarding the bodies had made a game of picking an ant in line
and wagering on the number of seconds it would take it to reach the guy's
mouth.

"Just to
the lips?" Becker asked. "Or all the way inside?"

"Inside,"
the taller of the two uniforms said.

Becker noticed
a little piece of machinery sticking up out of the dirt. He kicked at
it with his toe, and it came loose from the ground. The piece of black
metal was an inch long, cast in a figure-eight pattern. Not a tool, he
decided as he stooped and picked it up, but some sort of hardware. Two
round half-inch stainless-steel prongs, their ends grooved, connected
to the figure-eight-shaped flange. He turned it back and forth in his
hand and showed it to Chacón. "Know what this is?"

"No, maybe
a car part."

"Let's bag
it," Becker said.

Chacón put
the piece in a little plastic evidence bag on which he recorded the date
and location.

"Who's the
mope?" Becker asked, indicating the middle-aged white man sitting within
the outside layer of yellow tape. Two perimeters had been erected. Tape
one protected the interior scene. The second, encompassing driveways on
either side of the house and part of the street, formed a staging area
where the officers, witnesses, and forensics people could operate and
be separated from the public and media.

"Neighbor,"
the second uniformed cop answered. "He's the guy who found the DBs and
called it in."

"What's
his name?" Chacón asked.

"Johnson.
Cal Johnson."

Becker nodded
toward the house. As primary officer assigned to this case, he made the
call on how they would proceed. Before speaking to Johnson, he wanted
to familiarize himself with the entire crime scene. He walked around an
anemic flower bed of mostly dirt and dying daisies and stepped up the
single wooden stair leading to the front door. To the right of the door
a rusted hibachi sat in cement. The woman's body was just inside. From
the neck down, her body faced the ceiling. It took him a second to realize
that he was looking at the back of her head. Her face lay buried in the
blood-soaked gray carpet. The torque that had snapped her neck had exposed
white vertebrae. The fingers on both hands were bruised a deep purple
and twisted at unnatural angles.

Chacón came
up behind him. He was one of those tall, quiet types who observed everything
but said little. Now he made a small grunt of shock.

Becker closed
his eyes and took a deep breath through his mouth, giving his senses a
break. He had seen death before, but this one made him check his gag reflex.
Murder was one thing. People get mad, lose control, snap or whatever,
and kill someone. It happened every day, every minute of the day somewhere,
probably. But what kind of a human was capable of committing such extreme
torture? That he would never fathom. Maybe he was old-fashioned, but the
fact that the victim was a woman made this cruelty even worse. He flexed
his own undamaged hands, unwillingly imagining the ache of having his
fingers cracked like wishbones.

"Let's get
to work," he said.

He opened
his eyes and looked around the room. The table in front of the couch had
been upended and several pictures torn from the wall. Rectangular patches
of unfaded paint testified to their previous locations. From the doorway
he could also see that drawers in the bedroom dresser had been pulled
out and dumped on the floor. The two men toured the rest of the house.
The first police on the scene had done this also, making sure no other
victims had been overlooked. Becker and Chacón took care to travel in
pathways already used by those officers. The kitchen appeared undisturbed
as did the bathroom. They returned to the front room where the body was
and tried to reconstruct what had happened.

It seemed
that either the unknown subject(s) had found what they were looking for
or something had interrupted them. A mass of aged papers was on the floor
of the bedroom closet. The cardboard box that had apparently held the
papers sat upright beside them. Ellen was written in Marks-A-Lot across
the front. Clearly a parent's collection of mementos. They were arranged
in chronological order, starting with grammar school report cards and
childish drawings rendered in happy colors -- a girl and her mom and dad
holding hands in the sun with flowers growing at their feet. Becker thought
of the abused flower bed out front.

The artwork
turned more sophisticated. Pencil sketches of horses and dogs. His own
preteen girls were nuts for horses and dogs. Directly to the right of
the sketches was a 1971 junior high school yearbook opened to the S's.
He looked for and found a Summers. Ellen Summers. If she was in ninth
grade fourteen years ago, that would put her age at about twenty-nine
now.

The documentation
that was fanned across the floor filled in those missing years. Release
forms from county jail, bail receipts, and probation reports. There was
also a flyer from a club called the Spearmint Rhino. It advertised itself
as an adult cabaret. The picture of the sultry blonde on all fours and
clad only in a G-string filled in the subtext. The face of the girl on
the flyer matched the ninth-grade black-and-white photo of Ellen Summers
given a few trips around a rough block. The flyer had crease marks in
it, as if it had been folded in thirds and fitted inside an envelope.

An uneven
spray of blood over the papers told him that they had been arranged here
prior to at least some of the carnage.

"Time to
talk to the neighbor," Becker said. The two detectives left the house
and approached Cal Johnson, who was still sitting between the tapes.

"I couldn't
figure it out," Johnson said. A black cap with SIR MIX CONCRETE PRODUCTS
written in white letters above the brim shaded the top half of his face.
The stub of an unlit cigar was wedged between his fingers.

He sat on
a frayed lawn chair. It sagged under his weight. He was in his mid-fifties
and had the milky eyes of a serious drinker. Broken capillaries flecked
his nose and cheeks. His jowls wobbled as he shook his head, too overwhelmed
to go on.

Becker waited
patiently for the guy to continue. He'd seen this before. People needed
to pick their own way to explain horror.

"I thought
maybe her hair was covering her face. I even tried to push it aside so
she could breathe but her face wasn't where it was supposed to be. Then
I saw all the blood." Johnson stopped to spit.

Becker nodded,
feeling the bile in his own throat. And then there were the fingers, he
wouldn't have missed those. Judging from the darkness of the bruising,
the damage to them had happened prior to death. Becker wondered again
if the killer(s) had gotten what they wanted.

"Did you
touch anything else?"

Johnson
shook his head. "I just wanted out of there."

"Where did
you call from?"

"My house,"
he said, nodding toward next door. "There's a daughter, I think."

The rest
of the forensic team arrived, and the next four hours were spent going
over the crime scene and taking statements. One woman was almost certain
she had heard a car speeding away, but she could offer no description.

It was midday
when Becker and Chacón drove back to the station. They ran the daughter's
name through the Criminal Justice Information System and were soon rewarded
with an abundance of data. They cleared their intentions with the coroner's
office. Death notifications usually fell to the medical examiner or at
least were done in conjunction with the ME's office. This one Becker wanted
to handle personally.

The two
cops drove to the daughter's current known address: the California Institution
for Women at Frontera. Becker had made many visits to closest of kin in
his twenty-year career. Delivered horrible news -- a fifteen-year-old
struck down on his bike in a straight-up hit-and-run. Spouses killed in
freak accidents. An elderly relative not heard from in a while -- found
dead a week and God forbid if a hungry Fido had been locked alone in the
house with the dearly departed. It always surprised him how calmly most
people took the news. Shock, probably. They'd shift into host mode, invite
him in, make coffee, ask their questions politely, and he'd always put
on his best I-give-a-shit face. There was the one time a guy acted differently.
His father had been killed in a home-invasion robbery. The guy ranted
and railed, got hysterical. Later it turned out the son had contracted
the hit. Becker never forgot that.

Two things
were on his mind as he headed east to San Bernardino County. He wondered
how Ellen Summers was going to take the news and if his stomach would
settle in time to enjoy Flo's daily special at the restaurant on the grounds
of the nearby Chino Airport.

Munch Mancini
used to be a biker chick who was handy with a wrench but had a few bad
habits like booze, drugs, and bad taste in men. The heroine of Barbara
Seranella's lively, engaging series of mysteries, Munch is trying to clean
up her new life as a solid citizen and single mother by staying away from
the temptations of her old one.

But when
her closest friend, Ellen, gets out of jail and learns just how badly
someone wants the money she took from a man who tried to kill her, Munch
can't turn her away. It's not like Munch doesn't have her own problems:
she's being stalked by the mother of one of her daughter Asia's playmates,
trying to resuscitate her moribund limousine business, and in the middle
of moving into the first house she's ever owned. And now she's got a sullen
stripper on her bad side, counterfeit money in her kid's toy box, a new
lover who's also a cop, and a very strange guy who says he's her friend's
father but might also be a killer who's staying one step ahead of every
move she makes.

Barbara
Seranella was
born in Santa Monica and grew up in Pacific Palisades. After a restless
childhood that included running away from home at 14, joining a hippie
commune in the Haight, and riding with outlaw motorcycle clubs, she decided
to settle down and do something normal so she became an auto mechanic.
In the back of her heart, she always wanted to be a writer, but first
she had to make a living. She worked at an Arco station in Sherman Oaks
for five years and then a Texaco station in Brentwood for another twelve.
At the Texaco station, she rose to the rank of service manager and then
married her boss. Figuring she had taken her automotive career as far
as it was going to carry her, she retired in 1993 to pursue the writing
life.

Mrs. Seranella
divides her time between her homes in Laguna Beach and La Quinta, California
where she lives with husband, Ron, their dogs and her four step-daughters.